Tag Archives: wearable technology

The Cloak of Levitation, Part 1: An overview

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When Dr. Strange visits the New York Sanctum for the first time, he passes by a vitrine in which a lush red cape hovers in midair. It’s the Cloak of Levitation, and in this moment it chooses Strange. We see many of its functions throughout the movie.

Functions

  • When the glass of the vitrine is broken and Kaecilius stabs at Strange with a Soul Sword, the Cloak reaches out with a corner and stays Kaecilius’ hand to save Strange.
  • When Kaecilius knocks Strange down a stairwell, the Cloak chases him, catches him, and floats him back up to the fight. (See above.)
  • Attached by two fibulae to his surcoat, it can pull him, physically, and does so several times for different reasons:
    • to get him out of the first fight with Kaecilius
    • to help him dodge the soul sword
    • to keep him from grabbing ineffective weapons, pointing him instead to the more effective Crimson Bands of Cyttorak
  • Unbidden, the Cloak wraps itself around the head of one of Kaecilius’ zealots, drags him around, and slams his head into the walls and floor until the zealot is dead. (Even though, for the entire end of the fight, Strange is across town getting medical attention.) After the combat, the Cloak hovers next to the dead zealot, perhaps keeping watch.
  • After Strange tells Christine goodbye in the surgical prep room, the Cloak gently floats itself into place and uses the corner of its popped collar to remove blood from Strange’s face, to his annoyance. He tells it to, “Stop!” and it relaxes.
  • It pulls him out of the path of some flying debris while time is reversed before the Hong Kong Sanctum, and defends him from a punch later in the same sequence.
  • He uses it to fly through the portal into the Dark Dimension to face Dormammu.
  • It dons itself in the Kamar-Taj, brusquely enough to cause Strange to catch his balance.

The Cloak is like a guardian angel. Or maybe a super-familiar, in the wizard sense. It keeps an eye out for Strange. It is able to predict, protect, crudely inform, and, not least, fly. It acts as both an assistant and an agent. (More on this later)

Wearable Analysis

Let’s first look at it as a wearable. Turns out it fares well according to the wearable principles I laid out in the The Combadge & ideal Wearables post. Those principles are discussed individually below.

Sartorial? Yes.

The Cloak is literally a piece of clothing and quite inline with fashion trends of the sorcerous and superhero worlds. A dash of panache for the workday and a night flying above the town. I’m saying it looks quite in place for being a piece of tech.

Social? Yes, kind of.

The cape does not signal its cape-abilities (how many terrible puns will I allow myself, here? Time will tell…) and so might score low on its social aspect. But it is a unique mystical item. Those in the know, know. Its reputation conveys its abilities. To those who don’t know, its cape-ness grants an initial element of surprise, as we saw when it blocked Kaecilius’ stab the first and second time. The villain was as surprised as we. The Cloak is cloaked, but this is a feature.

Tough to accidentally activate? Yes.

To fly to the Dark Dimension, he places his hands in a “Devil sign,” with 1st and 4th fingers extended and the others bent down to the thumb. He points his hands towards his feet, and flies off in the opposite direction. This isn’t him casting a spell. It’s him telling the Cloak what he wants it to do. That’s hard to do by accident.

Apposite I/O? Yes.

For the most part, the Cloak acts of its own accord. Looking at the list above, the only times it acts under instruction is when Strange tells it to stop wiping his cheek and when he uses it to fly to the Dark Dimension. He uses speech for the former and finger-tutting for the latter.

The rest of its functionality (that is, most of it) is it acting on its own, which doesn’t befit an i/o mapping evaluation.

Easy to access and use? Yes, exceptionally.

Being a key part of Strange’s uniform, and able to both get out of the way and onto shoulders when it needs to, the Cloak is not just easy to use, but it makes itself easy to access and use, so it scores high here.

In total, a very usable and useful wearable tech. Next let’s look at how we might get to a Cloak-like object using real world technology.

Wearable soundboard

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One of Griff Tannan’’s gang, named Data, wears a sound board on his vest. When Tannan gets a rise out of Marty by asking if he’’s “chicken,” the gang member underscores the accusation by removing a protective plate over some buttons on his vest and holds one down to play a looping sound clip of a clucking chicken.

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That’s pretty awesome, actually. Having all the sounds available at the touch of a button adds a layer of remix culture expressiveness with maximum speed. No modes, no menus, just remembering which sound goes with which button, and his spatial memory is perfect for that. If the buttons were labeled with the sound, or shaped informatively, it might reduce the burden on memory.

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You might also reduce the time it takes to respond by removing the protective plate, but Griff is enough of a loose cannon that he might go violent if an accidental sound effect insulted him. So that extra step is probably the safest.

But if we were to really make this it’s most awesome, you’d make it agentive, such that the plate constantly listened to the conversation for keywords or keyphrases and responded with appropriate snarky sound effects. (Smartphone startup founded around this idea in 3…2…1…)

The Jacket

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Dr. Brown gives Marty some 21st century clothes in order to blend in. The first is the pair of Nike MAGs. The other item of clothing Marty must don is a jacket. It has two functions. When Marty first tries it on, the sleeves are nearly twice as long as they ought to be. After complaining that it doesn’t fit, Dr. Brown reaches and pinches a blinking and beeping red LED at the base of the jacket’’s zipper. In response, the sleeves retract to a proper length, the pocket flaps shrink, and the epaulettes flatten out as a synthesized voice states, “Adjusting fit.”

Marty McFly and Doc Brown interact in front of a time machine, with Doc wearing a colorful shirt and Marty in a distinctive jacket.
Two characters speaking in front of a time machine car, one wearing a colorful outfit and the other in a jacket, set in an urban environment.
A scene featuring two characters near a modified car, with one character looking at his clothing and the other wearing a colorful jacket.
BttF-Griff-gang

You might wonder why, if the jacket is designed to be properly fitted, the sleeves start at a length” that would not fit any human. My answer is fashion. Later, when we see Marty Jr. in the 80s shop, one sleeve is left super long. It could be that his is busted or just that he’s disheveled, but youth fashion has often adopted Handicap Principle as markers of status and aloofness. c.f. hip hop baggy pants. No one else shows this same thing, but fashion seems very individualized in 2015 (1985).

Later after Marty gets soaked in the town square reflecting pool, the red LED on the zipper begins beeping and blinking again. Marty reaches down and pinches it, and a voice announces, “Drying clothes: on,” as hidden air dryers puff the jacket around him drying his hair and the jacket. When it’’s done it emits a slim beep it announces happily, “Your jacket is now dry!”

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Sure, that’s pretty cool, and obviously played for the How-Wacky-Is-This joke. But the one-button interface speaks to a great deal of context awareness and capabilities for a wearable.

Nike MAGs

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BttF_026Dr. Brown gives Marty some 21st century clothes in order to blend in. The first of these items are shoes. Marty is surprised to see no laces. To activate them, he pushes his foot into the shoe. When his heel makes contact, the main strap constricts to hold his heel in place. Then the laces constrict to hold the ball of the heel down. Finally, the tongue of the shoe and the “Nike” logo glow.

Yep. Perfect. The activation is natural to the act of putting on the device. The glow acts as a status indicator and symbol. No wonder everyone wanted them.

Night Vision Goggles

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Genarro: “Are they heavy?”
Excited Kid: “Yeah!”
Genarro: “Then they’re expensive, put them back”
Excited Kid: [nope]

Screenshot-(248)

The Night Vision Goggles are large binoculars that are sized to fit on an adult head.  They are stored in a padded case in the Tour Jeep’s trunk.  When activated, a single red light illuminated in the “forehead” of the device, and four green lights appear on the rim of each lens. The green lights rotate around the lens as the user zooms the binoculars in and out. On a styling point, the goggles are painted in a very traditional and very adorable green and yellow striped dinosaur pattern.

Tim holds the goggles up as he plays with them, and it looks like they are too large for his head (although we don’t see him adjust the head support at all, so he might not have known they were adjustable).  He adjusts the zoom using two hidden controls—one on each side.  It isn’t obvious how these work. It could be that…

  • There are no controls, and it automatically focuses on the thing in the center of the view or on the thing moving.
  • One side zooms in, and the other zooms out.
  • Both controls have a zoom in/zoom out ability.
  • Each side control powers its own lens.
  • Admittedly, the last option is the least likely.

Unfortunately the movie just doesn’t give us enough information, leaving it as an exercise for us to consider.

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Dr. Grant, Timmy is hogging the tech

Note that there aren’t enough goggles in the Jeep for everyone.  During a tour this might set up a competition for the goggles.  Considering how much a ticket to the island is implied to cost, the passengers in the Jeep would likely be unhappy at this constraint.

Better here would be some kind of HUD for the entire Jeep, with a thermal overlay or night-vision projection of what’s around the Jeep.

Alternatively, if cost is indeed an issue to Hammond, the TV screen could be used to show camera feeds of the pen and dinosaurs inside.

Hopefully A Prototype

The lights on the front show what’s happening internally, and give feedback that the goggles are doing something to people watching.  As we learn soon after this scene, dinosaurs are also very sensitive to light and motion.  Especially the T-Rex.

These night vision goggles would work best in darkness, where it would add to the tour to see a dinosaur behaving (relatively) naturally.  If the dinosaurs on the tour are very sensitive to light, then the motion on the front of the goggles would actually be counter to the goals person using the goggles.

So let’s presume these were a prototype, and why they were in the trunk and not mentioned by Hammond at the start of the tour.

Overall

The goggles look easy to use, but appear to need refinement from field experience.  A key point will be how the passengers react to having enough of them, and whether they serve the tourists in experiencing the park as intended.

Proton Pack

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Proton-Pack-02

The Ghostbusters wear “unlicensed particle accelerators” to shoot a stream of energy from an attached gun. Usefully, this positively-charged stream of energy can bind ghosts. The Pack is the size of a large camper’s backpack and is worn like one. The Proton pack must be turned on and warmed up before use. Its switch, oddly, is on the back, where the user cannot get to it themselves.

Proton-Pack-03

This makes for some awesome comedy, but is sorely unusable. If a ghostbuster was alone, he’d have to remove the pack to get at the switch. It also means that a sneaky antagonist could approach from behind and disable the thing mid-busting. Not the wisest design. Better would be to put this switch on the pack on a lower, anterior corner so the ghostbuster can switch it himself.

To prevent accidental activation you’d want to recess the switch in the housing, and maybe even require a button hold or a two-hand trip for extra security.

activelight

There is a display that lets an observer know that the pack is working. It’s a column of blue LEDs that continually progresses upward. Similar to the activation switch, this signal should be placed so that the actual wearer can see it in use, and so that the signal isn’t blared to everyone standing behind him, lest it die and the Ghostbuster need to bluff to buy time.

Brain interfaces as wearables

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There are lots of brain devices, and the book has a whole chapter dedicated to them. Most of these brain devices are passive, merely needing to be near the brain to have whatever effect they are meant to have (the chapter discusses in turn: reading from the brain, writing to the brain, telexperience, telepresence, manifesting thought, virtual sex, piloting a spaceship, and playing an addictive game. It’s a good chapter that never got that much love. Check it out.)

This is a composite SketchUp rendering of the shapes of all wearable brain control devices in the survey.

This is a composite rendering of the shapes of most of the wearable brain control devices in the survey. Who can name the “tophat”?

Since the vast majority of these devices are activated by, well, you know, invisible brain waves, the most that can be pulled from them are sartorial– and social-ness of their industrial design. But there are two with genuine state-change interactions of note for interaction designers.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

The eponymous Game of S05E06 is delivered through a wearable headset. It is a thin band that arcs over the head from ear to ear, with two extensions out in front of the face that project visuals into the wearer’s eyes.

STTNG The Game-02

The only physical interaction with the device is activation, which is accomplished by depressing a momentary button located at the top of one of the temples. It’s a nice placement since the temple affords placing a thumb beneath it to provide a brace against which a forefinger can push the button. And even if you didn’t want to brace with the thumb, the friction of the arc across the head provides enough resistance on its own to keep the thing in place against the pressure. Simple, but notable. Contrast this with the buttons on the wearable control panels that are sometimes quite awkward to press into skin.

Minority Report (2002)

The second is the Halo coercion device from Minority Report. This is barely worth mentioning, since the interaction is by the PreCrime cop, and it is only to extend it from a compact shape to one suitable for placing on a PreCriminal’s head. Push the button and pop! it opens. While it’s actually being worn there is no interacting with it…or much of anything, really.

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Head: Y U No house interactions?

There is a solid physiological reason why the head isn’t a common place for interactions, and that’s that raising the hands above the heart requires a small bit of cardiac effort, and wouldn’t be suitable for frequent interactions simply because over time it would add up to work. Google Glass faced similar challenges, and my guess is that’s why it uses a blended interface of voice, head gestures, and a few manual gestures. Relying on purely manual interactions would violate the wearable principle of apposite I/O.

At least as far as sci-fi is telling us, the head is not often a fitting place for manual interactions.

Wearable Control Panels

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As I said in the first post of this topic, exosuits and environmental suits are out of the definition of wearable computers. But there is one item commonly found on them that can count as wearable, and that’s the forearm control panels. In the survey these appear in three flavors.

Just Buttons

Fairly late in sci-fi they acknowledged the need for environmental suits, and acknowledged the need for controls on them. The first wearable control panel belongs to the original series of Star Trek, “The Naked Time” S01E04. The sparkly orange suits have a white cuff with a red and a black button. In the opening scene we see Mr. Spock press the red button to communicate with the Enterprise.

This control panel is crap. The buttons are huge momentary buttons that exist without a billet, and would be extremely easy to press accidentally. The cuff is quite loose, meaning Spock or the redshirt have to fumble around to locate it each time. Weeeeaak.

Star Trek (1966)

TOS_orangesuit

Some of these problems were solved when another WCP appeared 3 decades later in the the Next Generation movie First Contact.

Star Trek First Contact (1996)

ST1C-4arm

This panel is at least anchored, and located in places that could be located fairly easily via proprioception. It seems to have a facing that acts as a billet, and so might be tough to accidentally activate. It’s counter to its wearer’s social goals, though, since it glows. The colored buttons help to distinguish it when you’re looking at it, but it sure makes it tough to sneak around in darkness. Also, no labels? No labels seems to be a thing with WCPs since even Pixar thought it wasn’t necessary.

The Incredibles (2004)

Admittedly, this WCP belonged to a villain who had no interest in others’ use of it. So that’s at least diegetically excusable.

TheIncredibles_327

Hey, Labels, that’d be greeeeeat

Zipping back to the late 1960s, Kubrick’s 2001 nailed most everything. Sartorial, easy to access and use (look, labels! color differentiation! clustering!), social enough for an environmental suit, billeted, and the inputs are nice and discrete, even though as momentary buttons they don’t announce their state. Better would have been toggle buttons.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

2001-spacesuit-021

Also, what the heck does the “IBM” button do, call a customer service representative from space? Embarrassing. What’s next, a huge Mercedez-Benz logo on the chest plate? Actually, no, it’s a Compaq logo.

A monitor on the forearm

The last category of WCP in the survey is seen in Mission to Mars, and it’s a full-color monitor on the forearm.

Mission to Mars

M2Mars-242

This is problematic for general use and fine for this particular application. These are scientists conducting a near-future trip to Mars, and so having access to rich data is quite important. They’re not facing dangerous Borg-like things, so they don’t need to worry about the light. I’d be a bit worried about the giant buttons that stick out on every edge that seem to be begging to be bumped. Also I question whether those particular buttons and that particular screen layout are wise choices, but that’s for the formal M2M review. A touchscreen might be possible. You might think that would be easy to accidentally activate, but not if it could only be activated by the fingertips in the exosuit’s gloves.

Wearableness

This isn’t an exhaustive list of every wearable control panel from the survey, but a fair enough recounting to point out some things about them as wearable objects.

  • The forearm is a fitting place for controls and information. Wristwatches have taken advantage of this for…some time. 😛
  • Socially, it’s kind of awkward to have an array of buttons on your clothing. Unless it’s an exosuit, in which case knock yourself out.
  • If you’re meant to be sneaking around, lit buttons are counterindicated. As are extruded switch surfaces that can be glancingly activated.
  • The fitness of the inputs and outputs depend on the particular application, but don’t drop the understandability (read: labels) simply for the sake of fashion. (I’m looking at you, Roddenberry.)

(Other) wearable communications

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The prior posts discussed the Star Trek combadge and the Minority Report forearm-comm. In the same of completeness, there are other wearable communications in the survey.

There are tons of communication headsets, such as those found in Aliens. These are mostly off-the-shelf varieties and don’t bear a deep investigation. (Though readers interested in the biometric display should check out the Medical Chapter in the book.)

Besides these there are three unusual ones in the survey worth noting. (Here we should give a shout out to Star Wars’ Lobot, who might count except given the short scenes where he appears in Empire it appears he cannot remove these implants, so they’re more cybernetic enhancements than wearable technology.)

Gattaca-159

In Gattaca, Vincent and his brother Anton use wrist telephony. These are notable for their push-while-talking activation. Though it’s a pain for long conversations, it’s certainly a clear social signal that a microphone is on, it telegraphs the status of the speaker, and would make it somewhat difficult to accidentally activate.

Firefly_E11_036

In the Firefly episode “Trash”, the one-shot character Durran summons the police by pressing the side of a ring he wears on his finger. Though this exact mechanism is not given screen time, it has some challenging constraints. It’s a panic button and meant to be hidden-in-plain-sight most of the time. This is how it’s social. How does he avoid accidental activation? There could be some complicated tap or gesture, but I’d design it to require contact from the thumb for some duration, say three seconds. This would prevent accidental activation most of the time, and still not draw attention to itself. Adding an increasingly intense haptic feedback after a second of hold would confirm the process in intended activations and signal him to move his thumbs in unintended activations.

BttF_066

In Back to the Future, one member the gang of bullies that Marty encounters wears a plastic soundboard vest. (That’s him on the left, officer. His character name was Data.) To use the vest, he presses buttons to play prerecorded sounds. He emphasizes Future-Biff’s accusation of “chicken” with a quick cluck. Though this fails the sartorial criteria, being hard plastic, as a fashion choice it does fit the punk character type for being arresting and even uncomfortable, per the Handicap Principle.

There are certainly other wearable communications in the deep waters of sci-fi, so any additional examples are welcome.

Next up we’ll take a look at control panels on wearables.

Precrime forearm-comm

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Though most everyone in the audience left Minority Report with the precrime scrubber interface burned into their minds (see Chapter 5 of the book for more on that interface), the film was loaded with lots of other interfaces to consider, not the least of which were the wearable devices.

Precrime forearm devices

These devices are worn when Anderton is in his field uniform while on duty, and are built into the material across the left forearm. On the anterior side just at the wrist is a microphone for communications with dispatch and other officers. By simply raising that side of his forearm near his mouth, Anderton opens the channel for communication. (See the image above.)

MinRep-080

There is also a basic circular display in the middle of the posterior left forearm that displays a countdown for the current mission: The time remaining before the crime that was predicted to occur should take place. The text is large white characters against a dark background. Although the translucency provides some visual challenge to the noisy background of the watch (what is that in there, a Joule heating coil?), the jump-cut transitions of the seconds ticking by commands the user’s visual attention.

On the anterior forearm there are two visual output devices: one rectangular perpetrator information (and general display?) and one amber-colored circular one we never see up close. In the beginning of the film Anderton has a man pinned to the ground and scans his eyes with a handheld Eyedentiscan device. Through retinal biometrics, the pre-offender’s identity is confirmed and sent to the rectangular display, where Anderton can confirm that the man is a citizen named Howard Marks.

Wearable analysis

Checking these devices against the criteria established in the combadge writeup, it fares well. This is partially because it builds on a century of product evolution for the wristwatch.

It is sartorial, bearing displays that lay flat against the skin connected to soft parts that hold them in place.

They are social, being in a location other people are used to seeing similar technology.

It is easy to access and use for being along the forearm. Placing different kinds of information at different spots of the body means the officer can count on body memory to access particular data, e.g. Perp info is anterior middle forearm. That saves him the cognitive load of managing modes on the device.

The display size for this rectangle is smallish considering the amount of data being displayed, but being on the forearm means that Anderton can adjust its apparent size by bringing it closer or farther from his face. (Though we see no evidence of this in the film, it would be cool if the amount of information changed based on distance-to-the-observer’s face. Writing that distanceFromFace() algorithm might be tricky though.)

There might be some question about accidental activation, since Anderton could be shooting the breeze with his buddies while scratching his nose and mistakenly send a dirty joke to a dispatcher, but this seems like an unlikely and uncommon enough occurrence to simply not worry about it.

Using voice as the input is cinegenic, but especially in his line of work a subvocalization input would keep him more quiet—and therefore safer— in the field. Still, voice inputs are fast and intuitive, making for fairly apposite I/O. Ideally he might have some haptic augmentation of the countdown, and audio augmentation of the info so Anderton wouldn’t have to pull his arm and attention away from the perpetrator, but as long as the information is glanceable and Anderton is merely confirming data (rather than new information), recognition is a fast enough cognitive process that this isn’t too much of a problem.

All in all, not bad for a “throwaway” wearable technology.